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By the time the final day of the final weekend of Austin City Limits 2016 rolls around, I realize just how well-oiled the machine of the festival is. Just about every set is on time. The lines for food and merchandise, while predictably long at peak hours, are never so slow that waiting in them is prohibitive to experiencing the music. Because Austin traffic moves centimeter by centimeter, the shuttles to the festival are slowed down, but they are free and efficient.

Those who don’t like doing many of the things that attending a music festival requires – standing to get a good view, being out in the hot sun for several consecutive hours – won’t be sold on ACL or any festival like it. Provided one is adaptable to those elements, however, she’ll find ACL to be a high quality music experience. I know that well after this weekend, the scorching sun and occasionally claustrophobic crowds won’t be the things I remember. Cannons of fire shooting in sync to the beats of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, Prinze George’s underrated afternoon set, and an incredible view of the Austin skyline as Radiohead takes to the stage: I don’t have to think hard to see the things I’ll take with me after this weekend.

Early into Saturday of Austin City Limits’ 2016’s second weekend, the crowds are noticeably less dense. Whether this is because much of the audience is recovering from a post-Radiohead bender following Friday’s stellar headlining performance or because people are looking for ways to avoid the heat beaming down square on Zilker Park is unclear. But those who made the time to come to ACL early on Saturday are rewarded with a wealth of fine performances. Sure, there’s a lot of humid heat to bear, but this is Austin: sweat is part of the price of admission.

The Austin City Limits music festival isn’t far from the heart of Austin’s downtown, but getting there isn’t a matter of simply walking through the front door. With no official parking adjacent to or near Zilker Park—that is, unless one wants to fork over several hundred dollars for a VIP parking pass—festivalgoers must either walk two to three miles to Zilker Park from downtown, or take a free but highly congested shuttle line from Republic Square downtown to ACL. There’s also a drop-off area in the north end of the park. Every day, the festival starts off with a small journey on the part of festivalgoers. This move to reduce vehicle traffic in this popular area of Austin’s south side is smart on the part of the festival conveners, though as I walked back downtown after the festival a steady line of cars on both lanes inched forward. On this weekend, all roads seem to lead to ACL.

It has become something of a cliché to say that Austin is heating up. Whether it’s in reference to Austin’s booming tech sector, its increasingly unwieldy population, or its scorching summer temperatures, the phrase “heating up” encapsulates numerous aspects of where Austin is in 2016. Of those “heating” features, the most relevant for attendees of the 2016 Austin City Limits (ACL) music festival—the 15th year of the event—is temperature. Austin is one of the fastest heating cities in America, and despite the wave of listicles about autumnal garb and pumpkin spice lattes that has followed its predictable course online, Austin continues to sting of summer. The thousands upon thousands of festivalgoers that will stampede South Austin’s Zilker Park for the final weekend of ACL will have to contend with lingering heat to keep alert and energized throughout each of the festival’s three days.

Grouplove‘s founders Hannah Hooper and Christian Zucconi recently became parents. The band has been around for over seven years and had released two albums prior to the life-changing status that is parenthood. Zucconi has spoken about the effects impending fatherhood and the rigors of touring had on song craft for the band’s third album Big Mess.